Not on display

Presented by Mrs Watts by the wish of the late George Frederic Watts 1913

Reference

N02920

Display caption

Walter Crane spent his honeymoon in Italy in 1871. While he was there, he became interested in 15th-century Italian art. For this work, Crane was inspired by Botticelli’s painting Birth of Venus from the 1480s. The compositions are similar. Both show Venus, the Roman goddess of love, emerging from the sea after her birth as a fully-grown woman. Like Botticelli, Crane painted with tempera, a medium made from coloured pigment and egg yolk. At his wife Mary's request, rather than draw from a female model, Crane used a male model, Alessandro di Marco, for the body of Venus.